This is a zine dedicated to black metal written by a follower of the left hand path, This zine has been around in a different format for a while and I have decided to make an edition for www.blogger.com, for more information email occultblackmetalzine@yahoo.com, new albums as well as classic albums will be reviewed on here as long as their good quality black metal,

Friday, April 3, 2015

Shroud Of Despondency/Family Tomb/2015 Full Length Review

Shroud Of Despondency are a band from Wisconsin that has been featured before in this zine and plays a very atmospheric and progressive form of black metal and this is a review of their self released 2015 album "Family Tomb".

A very dark, heavy and atmospheric sound starts off the album along with all of the musical instruments having a very powerful sound and after a few seconds grim black metal screams make their presence known on the recording and a good portion of the tracks are very long and epic in length and deep growls can also be heard in certain sections of the recording.

Keyboards have a very dominating sounding presence on this recording and the solos and leads the band uses are very dark and melodic and the songs also bring in a great mixture of slow, mid paced and fast parts with the faster sections bringing in a great amount of blast beats and some of the tracks also bring in a small amount of spoken word samples.

A lot of the songs on this recording bring in more of a raw black metal feeling that has been absent from previous recordings and the music also brings back the early symphonic black metal band at times before the genre became more mainstream and overproduced and as the album progresses acoustic guitars can be heard in certain sections of the recording.

Shroud of Despondency stay away from the more progressive and experimental stuff of previous recordings and goes back to their more atmospheric black metal roots to close the chapter of the band and this is suppose to be there final album, the production sounds very dark and raw while the lyrics cover anti religion themes.

In my opinion this is another great sounding recording from Shroud Of Despondency and if you are a fan of this band, you should check out this album. RECOMMENDED TRACKS INCLUDE "Birthrites Of The Sick" "Where Desolation Is Destiny" and "Blesse". 8 out of 10.